Actually, I do know about Adobe Walls. It was led by Quanah Parker, who is big here in Texas. His mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was abducted as a girl in Central Texas and lived happily for many years with the Commanche before she was "rescued." Quanah Parker was also a personal hero of an old friend of mine. I was in the process of getting some duplicates made of photos in our Special Collections as a gift, but my friend died. Alas, Parker died sometime after injury he sustained in a visit to Fort Worth. He and a friend were in a hotel room and one put out the light, not realizing that the gas was still flowing. The friend died.

What happened in Sussex? Kipling did! Not the being born bit, but a large amount of his work is set in or is about the place.

Sussex, 1902.

God gave all men all earth to love, But, since our hearts are small Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all; That, as He watched Creation's birth, So we, in godlike mood, May of our love create our earth And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content, As one some Surrey glade, Or one the palm-grove's droned lament Before Levuka's Trade. Each to his choice, and I rejoice The lot has fallen to me In a fair ground-in a fair ground -- Yea, Sussex by the sea!

Clean of officious fence or hedge, Half-wild and wholly tame, The wise turf cloaks the white cliff-edge As when the Romans came. What sign of those that fought and died At shift of sword and sword? The barrow and the camp abide, The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou'west All heavy-winged with brine, Here lies above the folded crest The Channel's leaden line, And here the sea-fogs lap and cling, And here, each warning each, The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight Our broad and brookless vales -- Only the dewpond on the height Unfed, that never fails -- Whereby no tattered herbage tells Which way the season flies -- Only our close-bit thyme that smells Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days The tinkling silence thrills; Or little, lost, Down churches praise The Lord who made the hills: But here the Old Gods guard their round, And, in her secret heart, The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found Dreams, as she dwells, apart.

Though all the rest were all my share, With equal soul I'd see Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair, Yet none more fair than she. Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed, And I will choose instead Such lands as lie 'twixt Rake and Rye, Black Down and Beachy Head.

I will go out against the sun Where the rolled scarp retires, And the Long Man of Wilmington Looks naked toward the shires; And east till doubling Rother crawls To find the fickle tide, By dry and sea-forgotten walls, Our ports of stranded pride.

I will go north about the shaws And the deep ghylls that breed Huge oaks and old, the which we hold No more than Sussex weed; Or south where windy Piddinghoe's Begilded dolphin veers, And red beside wide-banked Ouse Lie down our Sussex steers.

So to the land our hearts we give Til the sure magic strike, And Memory, Use, and Love make live Us and our fields alike -- That deeper than our speech and thought, Beyond our reason's sway, Clay of the pit whence we were wrought Yearns to its fellow-clay.

God gives all men all earth to love, But, since man's heart is smal, Ordains for each one spot shal prove Beloved over all. Each to his choice, and I rejoice The lot has fallen to me In a fair ground-in a fair ground -- Yea, Sussex by the sea!

...So live, Pardner, that when yer summons comes ta join That there trail drive, which moves Ta that mysterious realm, where each shall pitch His bedroll 'round the silent chuckwagon of death, Ya don't go, like some city dude at night, Scourged ta his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust in yer riata and saddle, approach yer grave Like one who wraps his old sugans Around him, and lies down ta pleasant dreams. -- Robert Louis "Slim" KiplingThanatopsis (last few lines)

If the Idaho Legion ain't there, it's boring. Also safe. Some damned fool gave the Eat-Em-Up Kid a pint of hooch and some bullets last night. We usually don't let him have bullets, in fact we never let him have bullets, 'cause he would most likely damage himself and/or others. He kept nippin' at the hoochinoo as he tried to load the .25 caliber cartridges into his .45. Fortunately, he'd put 'em in one end and they'd fall straight out the other. It's a good thing that the hooch took effect before his cussin' got any more out of hand, 'cuz as it is he turned all the white Ford Explorers in his part of town bright blue, burned the paint off six houses and three fences, and plumb raised blisters on a bunch of nuns two miles off and six hunnert feet up in the hills. Worst thing was though, his cussin' also ignited the fuses in the powder house at the Caribooboo Mine, which caused the dynamite to explode, which brought about two hunnert ton of rock down the side of Elegant Mountain, which closed off the road to Pass Pass (so called because it was discovered by a bunch of bridge players, who bypassed it), which totally stopped the beer wagons from reaching the Legion Hovel.

The Kid is in big, deep doo-doo, but it sure was an admirable job of cussin'.

It's the normal plain ol' Celtic Music ads now. What you saw must have been an aberration. I'm bushed. Just checking in to see that Mom is comfortable. Now I'm off to my comfortable bed, after telling the kids to turn off the lights behind them. I work tomorrow, they have the day off from school. They're up watching movies I borrowed from the library last week.

There's no doubt up is up, but it often seems people quibble over how far. But when you are down, there's a place for you among the Downs, just past the end of Lonely Street. The Downs are in west Sussex, of course, but Lonely Street is in (I believe) Memphis. It's a cyberspace thing.

Although there are no Downs in Paris or London, you can try being down and out there. Orwell near to them...(ugh!). But when you're up, any old place will serve.

There's snow on the tops of the hills and the ridges are slightly outlined in white. Today it's 60 F. and brilliantly clear. Tomorrow and Wednesday, more of the same only a little warmer. Rained a little last week, which is where the snow Up High came from. SLC was, as usual, suffering from too much air pollution.

WHITE SHARK RUSHES ACROSS INDIAN OCEAN IN RECORD-BREAKING SWIM, October 08 A female white shark has stunned scientists by swimming from South Africa to Australia and back in record time, shattering assumptions about how the fish migrates and navigates, according to a study published on Thursday. Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news7090.html

Ya know, I don't think that the shark thinks that it was something very much. I figger she was out there with some friends, drinking white wine and nibbling on people's toes, when the conversation turned to males. She talks about it for a while and then heads home. When she gets there, she's feeling a bit "frisky" so she goes out looking for, well, you know.

But there's no male shark anyway around that she can look at without tossing her cookies. Still feeling that way, she keeps looking, getting farther and farther away and getting more and more "frisky." Finally, she met this guy off the coast of South Africa, they had a few drinks, maybe went to a movie, had a few more drinks, and Nature Took Her Course.

Next morning, she wakes up and he's off at some feeding frenzy. Disgusted, she takes a shower and heads for home. Maybe stops for some coffee and a croissant before leaving SA. Back on the GBR, she tells her friends, over tea and gelignite on white, that those foriegn men aren't all they're claimed to be.

I don't think they were in time for them. But they were all top-rated professional dictators, all right.

In other news, the mystery of the universe continues to unfold, or split, as the case may be:

Can an Electron be in Two Places at the Same Time?

October 11, 2005

Max Planck Researchers in Berlin show that for electrons from nitrogen molecules, the wave-particle character exists simultaneously.

In something akin to a double-slit experiment, scientists at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, in co-operation with researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, have shown for the first time that electrons have characteristics of both waves and particles at the same time and in virtually the push of a button can be switched back and forth between these states.

Normally, we think of building blocks as static objects.

The researchers provided evidence that disrupting the reflective symmetry of these molecules by introducing two different heavy isotopes, in this case N14 and N15, leads to a partial loss of coherence. The electrons partially begin to localise on one of the two, now distinguishable, atoms. The results could have implications for the building and control of "artificial molecules", which are made of semiconductor quantum dots, and are a possible component of quantum computers. (Nature, September 29, 2005).

A hundred years ago, we took the first steps in recognising, at the level of elementary physical events, the dual character of nature that had been postulated in natural philosophy. Albert Einstein was the first who saw Max Planck's quantum hypothesis leading to this dual character. Einstein suggested the photon have an electromagnetic wave character, although photons had previously been considered as particles. That was the quintessence of his work on the photoelectric effect. Later in 1926, it was deBroglie that recognised that all the building blocks of nature known to us as particles - electrons, protons, etc. - behave like waves under certain conditions.

In its totality, therefore, nature is dual. None of its components can only be considered as a particle or as a wave. To understand this fact, Niels Bohr introduced in 1923 the Complementarity Principle: simply put, every component in nature has a particle, as well as a wavelike character, and it depends only on the observer which character he sees at any given time. In other words, the experiment determines which characteristic one is measuring - particle or wave.

His whole life long, Einstein suspected that natural characteristics actually depend on the observer. He believed that there must be a reality independent of the observer. Indeed, quantum physics has simply come to accept as a given over the years that there does not seem to be an independent reality. Physics has ceased questioning this, because experiments have confirmed it repeatedly and with a growing accuracy.

The best example is Young's double-slit experiment. Coherent light is passed through a barrier with two slits. On an observation screen behind it, there is a pattern made of light and dark stripes. The experiment can be carried out not only with light, but also particles - for example, electrons. If single electrons are sent, one after the other, through the open Young double slit, then a stripe-shaped interference pattern appears on the photo plate behind it. The pattern contains no information about the route that the electron took. But if one of the two slits is closed, an image appears of the other open slit from which one can directly read the path of the electron. What this experiment does not produce, however, is a stripe pattern and situation report. For that, a molecular double slit experiment is required that is based not upon position-momentum uncertainty, but on reflective symmetry.

The double-slit was voted the most beautiful experiment of all time in a 2002 poll by Physics World, published by England's Institute of Physics. Although each electron seems to go alone through one of the two slits, at the end a wavelike interference pattern is created, as if the electron split while it went through the slit, but then was subsequently re-unified. But if one of the slits is closed, or an observer sees which slit the electron went through, then it behaves like a perfectly normal particle. That particle is only at one position at one time, but not at the same time. So, depending on how the experiment is carried out, the electron is either at position A, position B, or at both at the same time.

But Bohr's Complementarity Principle, which explains this ambiguity, requires that one can only observe one of the two electron manifestations at any given time - either as a wave or a particle, but not both simultaneously. This remains a certainty in every experiment, despite all the ambiguity in quantum physics. Either a system is in a state of "both/and" like a wave, or "either/or" like a particle, relating to its localisation. This is, in principle, a consequence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which says that given a complementary pair of measurements - for example, position and momentum - only one can be determined exactly at the same time. Information about the other measurement is lost, proportionally.

Recently there has been a set of experiments suggesting that these various manifestations of material can be "carried over into" each other - in other words, they can switch from one form to the other and, under certain conditions, back again. This set of experiments is called quantum markers and quantum erasers. Researchers have shown in the last few years that for atoms and photons - and now, electrons - "both/and" and "either/or" exist side-by-side. In other words, there is a grey zone of complementarity. There are therefore experimentally demonstrable conditions in which the material appears to be both a wave and a particle.

These situations can be described with a duality relation. It can be seen as an extended Complementarity Principle for quantum physics; it can also be labelled a co-existence principle. It says that manifestations of material which would normally be mutually exclusive - e.g., local and not local, coherent and not coherent - are indeed measurable and make themselves evident, in a particular "transition area". One can speak of partial localisation and partial coherence, or partial visibility and partial differentiability. These are measurements that are connected to each other via the duality relation.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back through the double slit....

It was one of those days, lots of battles to wage, won most of 'em, a couple are pending. Had a chunk of skin (that wouldn't heal) frozen on my thumb and got a tetnus shot (did it on the same arm, might as well not have BOTH sides feeling bad). That puts long pithy science posts way outta my league. Want to write a little summary for us, Amos?

Mom, I'm feeling better today, though things still ache a little. Narcotic painkillers do have a role to play in our lives. Nothing like taking something at bedtime so you don't wake yourself up every time you move on the sore spot.

Bee-you-tee-ful sunny crisp fall day here today in North Texas. Warming up a bit too much this afternoon, but it will get better every day. The culmination of good fall weather is when this darned Daylight Savings Time ends and we get the pleasure of sleeping an hour longer. (It's even better if your bladder doesn't insist you get up at the old time).

I'm just shooting the breeze until someone else comes along to take up the slack. Rapaire, Amos, BWL, Rustic, Bunn--anyone out there?

Now on a more immediate frame, we have this piece of wionderful news -- the return of the Tasmanian tiger. If this works it will be the first time we have ever reversed extinction:

SCIENTISTS PLAN TO CLONE EXTINCT TASMANIAN TIGER, October 12 Australian scientists have revived a project to try to bring an extinct animal, the fabled Tasmanian tiger, back to life, the team leader said Wednesday. Renewed determination to recover genes from the bones and teeth of the tiger in museums had impressed sceptics, the dean of science at the University of New South Wales, Professor Mike Archer, told ABC radio here.